"As for happiness, I think the Americans were nearly right about it being a pursuit. But it’s not quite a pursuit. It’s more like an emergent property, like consciousness, and it comes out of a sense of meaning. For me, that’s very important. I have to feel—and it may be my religious background—I have to feel, above all, that this is a life of service. You build the things in your life that matter. It’s like having a 3-D printer. You build it layer by layer, and in the end you’ve got a rocket ship. It’s incremental and you can make it out of mushroom fibre, if you’d like.
So you do it layer by layer and you don’t worry so much about where it’s going to lead. With friendships, you go on putting the work in—you try to be a good friend, you try to show up, and then gradually you realize that you’re building something that is both high and deep. That is very sustaining. It’s these really quite old-fashioned core values that I think allow for a level of happiness such that even when things are difficult, as they must be in every life, even when we’re struggling either existentially or in a practical way, we still have these things that we have built ourselves and that are solid. We can find genuine comfort there, which is not escapism or a delusion."